Reading a safety procedure, writing your story and analyzing a test question are different kinds of work. Teaching them as if they were the same shortchanges learners. This guidebook is about recognizing the differences and making aligned instructional shifts. Fundamentally, you'll be asked to make an overall pedagogical change away from teaching to a level and a set of decontextualized skills to responding to the real purposes your learners read and write for. No two of those purposes are identical, but they share enough to be organized for instruction into seven practice types.
Every day your learners deal with reading and writing that decides something in their lives:
a form that releases a benefit
a safety sheet at a new job
a letter from their child's school
a story worth finishing.
You help them do the real thing, not a worksheet version of it. That is literacy in practice, and this site is a guide for the work you're already doing, with the organization of practice types and the reasoning behind them.
Here are a few questions to help you decide:
Do you have a nagging sense that "leveling" a learner doesn't quite capture what they actually need to read and write?
Have you ever taught to a test or a generic checklist and felt the real teaching was happening somewhere else?
Do you suspect the good instruction in your program is already there — under the reporting, the funding categories, the frameworks — waiting to be named?
Are you looking for practical materials, not another policy document telling you what you're doing wrong?
You won't find a curriculum here. There's no sequence to complete and no abstract outcomes to interpret. You'll find a way to see the literacy demands your learners already face, and to build teaching around them: seven distinct practice types, observational prompts to plan and teach across them, and a way to make progress visible — to the learner, to your program and to yourself.
(If you want the fuller argument for why teaching keeps drifting toward the generic — abstract levels and decontextualized skills — and why that isn't a failure of teaching, start with the research behind this site.)
Want to explore the framework? The overview introduces all seven practice types and what makes each one distinct.
What exactly is a practice type? Review a set of observational prompts that help you make the framework actionable in your planning and teaching.
Looking for practical teaching tools right away? Each practice type has a complete teaching overview: an analysis, instructional strategies, the educator's role and growth indicators.
Ready to teach the learners in front of you? The instructional planning section walks you through a planning process. It includes a program context guide, learner conversation template, a learner plan, instructional plan, an overview of enabling skills and progress indicators.
The ideas here draw on research into literacy as social practice, into reading and writing development and into the ways curriculum and assessment shape what gets taught. Together they make the case for a better approach than the generic or accountability models that dominate policy and most published materials.
